I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
Intel announces new FPGA families
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Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#32That's some news because Intel hadn't in a while. But IMHO this is is far more interesting: https://hardwarebee.com/gowin-semiconductor-new-22nm-high-pe... This is a real contender from China. Not just some new cheap chip, but actually competitive with Intel/Lattice/Xilinx offerings.
Competitive in what sense? in which market outside of china? Cyclone V a decade old platform offers similar capability and is a tested platform.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#33I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
There's always sound or image generation, or programming a game like Pong. That's always looked cool to me. There are some "easy" entry points, e.g. https://maker.pro/arduino/tutorial/getting-started-with-fpga..., but I've never gone as far as actually try them.
With a bit of luck, someone will reply with better options.
Edit: or look at this list: https://hackaday.io/search?term=fpga
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#34I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
For someone making hobby electronics experiments, an FPGA can be used to make a cheap (but with modest performances) logic analyzer and digital oscilloscope (and test signal generator, if desired).
Many years ago, that would have been the only solution to avoid paying thousands of dollars for a professional instrument.
However, nowadays there exist a number of commercial solutions for such cheap instruments, which are made exactly like this, i.e. with an FPGA surrounded by appropriate I/O circuits and connectors, some USB or Ethernet interface for the PC and some capture software.
These have the advantage that are ready to use out of the box, but making yourself such an instrument can be instructive.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#35The Intel Direct RF FPGAs are pretty spectacular. They report 64GSPS and 25GHz instantaneous bandwidth directly into FPGA fabric (no JESD) which greatly exceeds any other competitors’ IC offerings on the market. I wonder what they will cost: if their high-end 8ch device is <$16K then they will annihilate the competition (I’m able to get $2K per channel for large multichannel direct RF systems 1Ghz instantaneous all t…
I can only imagine how long it will take the fitter to pnr these insanely wide busses. Maybe a 13th gen CPU overclocked to 8GHz would be handy.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#36I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
When would a hobbyist need processing much faster than a modern beefy CPU provides, but not in a highly parallel fashion which a modern GPU provides?
My only relatively reasonable suggestion is making perfect hardware emulators for old hardware, like vintage computers and their parts.
Alas, FPGA programming model is neither easy nor intuitive, and the tools are mostly proprietary, expensive, and (as I heard) have a steep learning curve.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#37That's some news because Intel hadn't in a while. But IMHO this is is far more interesting: https://hardwarebee.com/gowin-semiconductor-new-22nm-high-pe... This is a real contender from China. Not just some new cheap chip, but actually competitive with Intel/Lattice/Xilinx offerings.
Competitive in what sense? in which market outside of china? Cyclone V a decade old platform offers similar capability and is a tested platform.
... at 22nm?
Apples to oranges.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#38I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
When would a hobbyist need processing much faster than a modern beefy CPU provides, but not in a highly parallel fashion which a modern GPU provides? My only relatively reasonable suggestion is making perfect hardware emulators for old hardware, like vintage computers and their parts. Alas, FPGA programming model is neither easy nor intuitive, and the tools are mostly proprietary, expensive, and (as I heard) have a s…
These things get used in dsp and other radio applications all the time.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#39I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
>Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things?
Yes, there is, if you're willing to learn.
>Always game to learn a new tech.
Great. A good starting point is NANDLand[0].
Their board is not at all a bad purchase at I'd still recommend to stick to iCE40 and the open source yosys/nextpnr stack, until you become competent enough to actually know what you want/need.
Re: Intel announces new FPGA families
#40I see a lot of use of FPGAs in things like cutting-edge machinery, warfare, and stock trading. Are there any cool hobbyist uses of these things? Always game to learn a new tech.
There is vast spread of FPGA sizes, so on affordability side it's definitely possible and some people did it.
The "problem" is really that you can do a LOT with MCUs, and programming FPGAs is very different than microcontrollers serially executing your code so they are pretty niche.
Like, if you for example needed to drive few thousand neopixels techncially FPGA would be perfect use case, just make a blob of memory and a bunch of serializers that feed each chain of LEDs.
... or you can just use some DMA magick on some fast STM32 and hack it out without having to learn new programming language.